Tuesday, February 21, 2006

"Secular" Provocateurs Deliberately Inciting Islam

(By Chris Moore, LibertarianToday.com) Two recent events have inspired the anti-Islamic, "clash of civilizations" cheerleaders to step up their ongoing cause of triggering a world war -level conflagration against "Islamofascism," (a code word for Islam increasing embraced by the "secular" Western Establishment, including President Bush). The first was the overwhelming Palestinian vote for Hamas candidates in democratic elections in the occupied territories; the second is the so-called "cartoon riots" that have ensued after publication of Muhammad caricatures first in Denmark, and later in other parts of Europe.

Predictably, warmongers in the mainstream media and elsewhere have cited both as evidence that the religion of Islam is congenitally flawed, and hence innately incompatible with Western values—indeed, with human values: When given the vote, it elects militantly violent Islamic representation; when exposed to freedom of the press, it riots if that press prints something offensive to Islamic law—or so the media campaign goes.

Here are some examples of how opportunistic mainstream media demagogues have attempted to use the two events to either negatively stereotype the entire religion of Islam, or indict components of it, and then infer its general loathsomeness through innuendo and linkage.

"The current uproar over cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper illustrates yet again the fascist intolerance that is at the heart of radical Islam.…That anything so mild could trigger a reaction so crazed — riots, death threats, kidnappings, flag-burnings — speaks volumes about the chasm that separates the values of the civilized world from those in too much of the Islamic world…Make no mistake: This story is not going away, and neither is the Islamofascist threat." —Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe syndicated columnist

"There are serious differences between German or Italian fascism and Hamas' Islamism. But these are largely intellectual and academic distinctions…[Hamas is] dedicated to restoring national pride at the expense of exterminating millions of people, who just happen to be Jews…If the new government had the means, it would be Palestine's willing executioners." –Jonah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist

"What passes for moderation in the Islamic community — ‘I share your rage but don't torch that embassy’ — is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means…These are not defenders of religion, but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West," Charles Krauthammer— Washington Post syndicated columnist

"Like the earlier Nazis, our generation's fascists hate anything good, not merely Jews and Americans…Nowhere in the world is there anywhere near the religious bigotry and sheer hatred of other religions that exists in the Muslim world…"-- Dennis Prager , national radio talk show host, Jewish World Review columnist

The rhetoric echoes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s generations-spanning, "long war" assessment of the threat posed by Islamic militants: "They will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," he gravely declared in early February.

In other words, it’s us or them. And so by now, as the West can clearly see (through means of repetition alone) Islam = fascism, Muslims = Nazis, and Americans and Europeans must either wage World War III against the gathering "Islamofascist" threat, or prepare to abandon our very way of life.

But a closer look at the two events that triggered such gnashing of teeth and fits of enmity suggests something else: that the Muslims were baited, even encouraged into rioting in response to the Muhammad caricatures printed in Europe; and that in electing Hamas, the Palestinians were merely voting in an Islamic counter-balance to the Jewish nationalist racialism of Israel, the state on who’s behalf so many Western opinion makers and political leaders are bent on waging a third world war.

Indeed, that Israel is an institutionally racist entity is more or less a settled question. Some in America still go through the motions of declaring it a "democracy" in order to justify the billions in welfare subsidies Washington still provides it annually, but those objective parties who have studied Israeli law long ago concluded that its many layers of segregationist restrictions favorable to Jews and punitive toward non-Jews qualify it for apartheid status. Instead of dividing black and white, however, Israel’s laws essentially codify first class citizenship for Jews and second class citizenship for Gentiles in general and Palestinians in particular. It’s a different kind of bigotry, but Israeli parallels to the Jim Crow south are striking.

In fact, in a secretly recorded speech, Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic security bureau Shin Bet, recently confessed that the Israeli security services and judiciary have two standards of justice—one for Arab suspects and another (more lenient) for Jewish ones.

But Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied territories have it even worse than their brethren in Israel. Their day to day existence, at the mercy and whim of heavily-armed Israeli soldiers and militant Jewish settlers, is a nearly Gulag-like experience. In fact, conditions there are so brutal, the Church of England recently voted to end financial investments in companies supporting Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Given that American support of Israel is a throwback to the Cold War era, when its racialist transgression could be overlooked because it was supposedly our ally against the Soviet Union (although even that assessment is debatable) by rights, Americans should by now have demanded a reassessment of our country’s "special" relationship with such a stubbornly segregationist enterprise.

This is one of the reasons why "Christian" Zionists, Jewish nationalists and their friends in the media are so eager to magnify and exaggerate the threat the Islamic world supposedly poses to the West: A war against Islam would reaffirm the cover of "ally" that Israel exploits to escape Western scrutiny and uses to maintain a blanket of secrecy over its ongoing, state-sanctioned bigotry.

(Sidebar: Such a war would also affirm the 21st Century reinvention of Christianity by advocates of the "Judeo-Christian" school of history as a philo-Semitic, Israel-centered bodyguard for Zionism. Theologically speaking, of course, Christianity has very little in common with Judaism—Jesus was in fact rebelling against what he came to regard as a corrupt and hypocritical belief system. His break was so complete that an entire new religion grew up around his dissidence. But few will ever accuse the opportunistic retailers of the myth of "Judeo-Christian civilization"—a phrase that only came into widespread usage after World War II—of intellectual coherence.)

A current example of the commonplace dissembling by Israeli loyalists is their claim that Hamas is "fascist" and bent on Jewish "extermination." Of course, they leave out of their tirades the fact that, for many years, Israel’s Mossad helped finance that Islamic party. (It seems the Israeli government wanted to keep the Palestinian people hopelessly divided between Hamas and the ineffectual, secular and socialistic Palestine Liberation Organization so that they would be easier to subjugate.) If the Isrealis really regarded Hamas as an existential threat, they would never have given it even one thin dime.

But hurling false "fascist" epithets at Muslims isn’t always enough. It takes more than that to spark a "clash of civilizations" level riot, and that’s where friends in the media, and caricatures of Muhammad come in handy.

Blogger xymphora provides us a sketch of how the plot to incite Muslims to riot by ridiculing their prophet in print progressed:

"The initial European salvo was to solicit the material and publish it in a Danish newspaper. It didn't work. In fact, there were peaceful Muslim protests… Danish Muslims behaved in exactly the responsible way that the current critics of the violence say they should have behaved. In response, they got nowhere with the legal system -- apparently it is only illegal [in Europe] to make fun of Jews…"

"Since the cabal of Europeans did not get the response they wanted from publication in Denmark, they decided to escalate, first by publishing in Norway, and then by publishing throughout Europe. This re-publication was all based on the completely bogus explanation of expressing solidarity with the free speech rights of their beleaguered Danish colleagues. Of course, free speech was never the issue. The cabal wanted to provoke the kind of violent protests in the Middle East that it felt would be useful in promoting ant-immigration policies in Europe, and defending the Israeli violence against the Palestinians."

As Washington DC-based investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported on February 5th, other neocon collaborators around the globe then took the baton:

"Neo-con media outlets such as The New York Sun, Fox News, and others are having a field day with the Muslim riots that have spread around the world in protest over the cartoons just as they had with the French "Muslim" arson attacks. Two New Zealand papers -- The Dominion Post in Wellington and The Press in Christchurch, have published their own controversial cartoons of Mohammed."

"The papers are owned by Australia's Fairfax Group, which also owns Melbourne's Age, and which was once financially connected to indicted neo-con Lord Conrad Black's scandal-ridden Hollinger publishing empire, which also includes arch neo-con Richard Perle. The Fairfax Group generally adheres to the neo-con corporatist party line."

But there’s more, because as it turns out, Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper who originally commissioned and published the caricatures of Muhammad that ended up sparking the riots, is apparently sympathetic to the anti-Islamic cause.

Christopher Bollyn of American Free Press notes: "Rose traveled to Philadelphia in October 2004 to visit Daniel Pipes, the Neo-Con ideologue who says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. Rose then penned a positive article about Pipes, who compares ‘militant Islam’ with fascism and communism. In April 2003, President George W. Bush nominated the rabid anti-Muslim Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally sponsored think tank dedicated to ‘the peaceful resolution of international conflicts.’"

Pipes, a fanatical Jewish nationalist, is probably most infamous for the following quip, written in the flagship neocon magazine National Review: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

And Pipes’ interlocutor Flemming Rose apparently agrees—which is why he so desperately wanted to "prove" to Europe that Muslims couldn’t be assimilated by going well out of his way to orchestrate an Islamic riot.

So it seems what we have is a sort of conspiracy of chauvinistic "secular" provocateurs. Zionists in Israel impose Jim Crow laws and hurl racialist abuse upon the Arab and Islamic minority; sympathetic Jewish nationalists and dimwitted "Christian" Zionist in the diaspora do all they can to provoke Islamic rage and retribution by deliberately printing blasphemous caricatures of Muhammad and then declaring Muslims "fascists," "supremacists" and "Nazis" when they angrily respond; the anti-Islamic forces then all join together to call upon Western civilization to smite the offensive "brown-skinned" Muslims because they are prone to violence.

Wouldn’t it be ironic (or is a better word Satanic) if America and Europe were to wage World War III against "our generation's fascists" on behalf of a religiously chauvinistic, racialist vision of the future modeled after segregationist Israel—and then pass the entire exercise off as a defense of the "secular" West? What a hellish recipe for generations of perpetual war. The Antichrist himself could hardly ask for more.

"[T]his is a direct throwback to the darkest days of Stalinism, when those criticizing the Soviet regime were, by virtue of this fact alone, branded ‘objective’ abettors of fascism, and dealt with accordingly…One day it’s the uniqueness and universality of theological absolutism; the next day it’s the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust. The constant is the totalitarian cast of mind, and attendant stigmatizing of dissent as a disease that must be wiped out by the state."

In this case, Islam is the "disease," and our scheming, mentally unbalanced "elite" want to use the U.S. military to wipe it out, or at the very least, subject it to a massive authoritarian program of government control by employing invasions and puppet dictators willing to put their own people in a secular straight jacket to do so.

If Christians and Americans are still capable of utilizing the shrewdness and common sense they have so often employed to solve problems in the past, instead of waiting around for their compromised and co-opted rulers to do the right thing by their own country, the West, and Islam, they will instead cast the entire traitorous U.S. political establishment, including the myriad usefulidiots on the Left, into elective purgatory. Only then will progress be made toward a just peace with our Islamic neighbors. Only then will sanity return to our increasingly unhinged country. Only then will well-intentioned people of all faiths and creeds be safe from the bigoted, hate-filled, Zionistfanatics bent on inciting violence and then using the "national security" pretense to control our every thought and deed on behalf of a vision of perpetual war.